I usually spend the first half of chocolate season testing new flavors. Since everyone asks me “How did you come up with that flavor?” I thought I’d share how I do it.

To my mind, a good bonbon has a balanced, complex flavor profile. Perfumers talk about “top notes,” “middle notes,” and “base notes”. I think of confections as having something similar. In my flavor vocabulary, bitter, earthy, and musky overtones are base notes. Most fruits, acids, and spices are middle notes. Flowers, citrus oils, and the sweeter herbs (e.g. basil) are top notes. Unlike perfumes, a good bonbon doesn’t need to have all three notes, but I strive to have at least two. (This is my personal preference, of course; everyone has different ideas of “good”.)

The first key to composing interesting flavors is understanding what chocolate tastes like.

Dark chocolate has a strong flavor, characterized by bitterness and what I think of as an “earthy” flavor, mixed with a little acidity, and tempered with moderate sweetness. Different varieties of dark chocolate will have different overtones on top of that, but they all share this basic combination.

Milk chocolate gives a milder and sweeter chocolate flavor, mixed with creaminess from the milk.

Good white chocolate is flavored with plenty of vanilla. (Poor white chocolate – which is unfortunately most of it – is flavored with artificial vanilla, made with palm oil rather than cocoa butter, and tastes crappy.) Strong floral overtones, sweet taste, creamy and milky.

Dark chocolate’s basic flavor profile is a base note: bitter and a little earthy. (Plus moderate sweetness.) To get a good flavor combination, I generally add either a middle or a top note. So I use dark chocolate with spices, nuts, florals, herbs, and the more acid fruits. I don’t generally use it with other base notes, because I find that the two flavors tend to “battle” each other, and the chocolate usually wins. So truffles (the fungus) don’t work well with dark chocolate, because the flavor of truffles is mostly an earthy fragrance, which disappears under an avalanche of similar flavors from the dark chocolate. Similarly, black tea does not perform well, because it consists mostly of base notes. Green tea, on the other hand, works just fine, because it has strong grassy and sometimes floral notes that sit in a higher range. So even though the chocolate overwhelms the bitter flavors in the green tea, you can taste the other flavors just fine.

Coffee is an interesting case, because it’s a mix of bitter and acid flavors, plus the scent of coffee, which I’d categorize (completely non-scientifically) as a middle to top note. When you mix coffee with dark chocolate, the result is a very bitter flavor with a hint of acidity and the coffee “nose”. (Plus chocolate, of course.) You’re basically doubling down on the bitterness and “depth” of the flavor. Some people like this; some don’t. If I do coffee with dark chocolate, I’ll mix it with a sweet and strongly flavored spice (cardamom leaps to mind), both to add a different note and to cut the perceived bitterness. More often, I’ll pair coffee with white chocolate, where the bitterness and acidity complement the floral “top note” of vanilla. I find that makes it easier to showcase both flavors.

White chocolate’s flavor profile is primarily floral (vanilla) plus a little creaminess. Most people think of vanilla as a subtle flavor, because it interacts only with the nose (only bitter/acid/sweet/salty is perceived by the tongue, the rest is in the nose). But it’s actually a very strong top note. So it tends to interfere with perception of other floral top notes – I don’t generally pair jasmine or rose with white chocolate, for example, because it turns into a war over who gets to dominate. (Lavender is an exception, I think because its pungency and latent bitterness operate in a different range than the vanilla.)

White chocolate is also very sweet, so I generally add something acid or bitter to balance out the flavor profile of a white chocolate center. So I’ll pair white chocolate with green tea, citrus fruits (particularly the tarter ones like lemon or lime), coffee, fruits, and so on. If I don’t, the result is often cloyingly sweet.

Milk chocolate is a midpoint between dark and white chocolate. I’m not a big milk chocolate person, so I don’t use it much.

Now, some flavors don’t mix well with any of the three chocolates. Maple syrup, for example, has a strong flavor. But it is composed of an earthy base note plus a sweet top note (very vanilla-ish in my book). Dark chocolate overwhelms the base note and white chocolate overwhelms the top note. So if you mix maple syrup with either white or dark chocolate to make a bonbon center, the taste doesn’t come through. Does that mean it’s impossible to use maple syrup in bonbons?

No! But it does mean you need to use it differently. You need to concentrate the flavor rather than diluting it. The easiest way to do this is by not using a ganache center (chocolate mixed with cream and butter), but a type of center that concentrates the flavor. Caramels and fruit jellies work very well. These centers concentrate the non-chocolate flavors and enable them to come through. (Blackberry, for example, is much more subtle than raspberry so does better when concentrated in a fruit jelly.) I’ve been experimenting with maple syrup for years, trying to get it to work – one of my test flavors this year is maple bourbon caramels, and it seems to be working out nicely so far. (The bourbon adds a woodiness and a little bitterness to offset the sweetness of the maple syrup. )

After I’ve created and tested the basic flavor profile, I cut up the centers and dip them into the appropriate chocolate. I’m testing two things. First, I want to know whether the taste of the center is still strong enough to come through clearly when mixed with the chocolate coating. Second, I want to see how the flavor develops on the tongue.

Chocolate bonbons do not deliver a single flavor. Instead, it’s parceled out over time, as the various parts of the bonbon break down in your mouth. In particular, the flavor of the center generally “arrives” before the flavor of the chocolate coating, because the center either has water mixed in to soften it (ganaches and fruit jellies) or is composed primarily of sugar (caramels and fruit jellies). The chocolate coating, on the other hand, is an emulsion of cocoa butter, cocoa powder (for dark chocolate), and sugar. You don’t really taste the cocoa powder until the cocoa butter surrounding it melts, whereas a water or sugar-based center releases its flavor a lot faster. (This is one reason why caramels and fruit jellies are so effective for concentrating flavors that don’t stand up to chocolate on their own – they melt faster in your mouth so you get a burst of the “pure” flavor before the chocolate shows up.)

I won’t throw a bonbon out of bed because it doesn’t develop in an intriguing way, but the ones that do tend to win a permanent place in the box. This is pretty rare.

The final step in flavor testing is to wait a few days and then sample the chocolate again. The inside of a chocolate, particularly a ganache, changes over time as the flavors combine and interact with the cream and dark chocolate. The results can be surprising. I had a very strongly flavored three-chile chocolate that looked very promising – but three days later, all you could taste was a hint of chipotle. The other two chiles had vanished completely.

Conversely, flavors can mellow. Last night I made a dark chocolate ganache with grapefruit zest and lavender. I tasted it right after making it, and it was such a disaster I nearly threw it out. I had forgotten that grapefruit zest and lavender buds are both bitter. Combined with the dark chocolate, the result was unpleasantly harsh. This morning I tasted it again, and the taste was quite pleasant – initial chocolate impact, with the lavender coming through in the middle and a hint of grapefruit at the end. I’m still not sure whether it will make it into production (the lavender tends to overwhelm the grapefruit, I think), but I’ll cut it, dip it in chocolate, and give it a chance. If I have time I may do a re-run and add more grapefruit zest.

One of my favorite flavors, by the way, is MacAllan 12 Scotch in a dark chocolate ganache. Not just because it tastes good – though it does – but because the flavors develop intriguingly over a period of about three days. Sadly, you’ll never taste this unless you make them yourself – so what are you waiting for?

Chop dark chocolate into 1/4 to 1/2″ dice. (If using Valrhona pastilles, you don’t need to chop anything). Put in a bowl.

Mix heavy cream with glucose and bring to a boil. Pour over the dark chocolate and let sit for a few minutes so the chocolate melts. (Push down any lumps of chocolate visible on top so they’re surrounded by the hot liquid.) Using a small whisk, whisk around the center of the bowl to mix the chocolate with the liquid. Try to create a smooth, thick mix in the center first, then slowly stir in widening circles until all the liquid has been incorporated. Add Scotch and repeat the process until you have a smooth mix. Finally, add the softened butter and repeat. Pour into a bowl and let cool to room temperature.

Using a melon baller, scoop bits out of the bowl and roll them between your (very clean, well-powdered with cocoa) hands to create a small sphere of ganache. Toss each sphere into a bowl of cocoa powder to coat them, then put them into a container and store in the fridge.

(The flavors won’t evolve as quickly as if you were storing a chocolate-covered bonbon at room temperature, but they do change – and it’s delicious at any stage.)

If you cannot find glucose (the syrup form, not the powdered kind), in a pinch you can just replace it with cream.

Troubleshooting:

If the mixture winds up curdling when mixed, it’s either too hot or too cold. If you get the temperature between 90 and 94F, it should work fine. (And yes, adjusting the temperature that finely is every bit as irritating as it sounds. But it will work.)

If the mixture is too soft, there isn’t enough cocoa butter in your chocolate. You can either re-melt and add more chocolate (keeping in mind the temperature note above), or – what I usually do – just stick it in the fridge until it’s firm enough to make into balls. (It will also make excellent hot chocolate if you add it to milk and microwave. It’s OK as hot fudge, though it tends to solidify.)

If the mixture is too hard, a little heat (I’m talking 5-10 seconds at a time in the microwave, on low power) will soften it up.

This was a record-setting year for chocolatiering: 136 pounds, 2 ounces of bonbons, in 38 different varieties. Alas, one of the varieties would not fit, so the peanut-butter-and-jelly ones did not make it into the boxes (and thus are not listed in the index). But I can assure you they were delicious!

If you’ve ever wondered what 136 pounds of bonbons looks like, wonder no more! Here I am with the complete collection:

Tien with 136 pounds of chocolates

Yesterday eight friends came by and helped pack 3,000 chocolates into candy cups and then into boxes, tied the boxes neatly with red ribbon, and packed them away for shipping. There were 83 boxes total – 40 for donors, 41 for friends, family, and a few select business associates, and 2 that I’m holding in reserve should a box or two get lost in the mail.

After that, my friends gleefully pillaged the remaining chocolates (there’s a reason I never have trouble finding volunteers to pack!), with the result that my house is now almost bare of chocolate. Once Mike takes the remaining few pounds to his salivating coworkers today, the house will be empty of chocolate. Except, of course, for the two cases (40 pounds) of chocolate I have left over for next year… 🙂

While Tigress mostly hid from the hordes of people, Fritz was ecstatic about the hordes of people who were clearly invited over just to pet him! Alas, they were mostly busy packing chocolates (how terrible!), but he did find some beautiful cat toys, made just for him.

Apologies for not posting earlier! I have been exhausted from laboring in the chocolate mines. It’s a difficult and dangerous job; first one has to locate a vein of chocolate, then blast out the surrounding rock, then refine the chocolate ore into pure molten chocolate, before it can be put into bonbons. 😉 But I have been persevering, and while the mining company refuses to allow photos in the mines due to the grueling nature of the work, I have some photos of the bonbon-making part of the process to share with you all.

Here’s the beginning of the process: chocolate slag, left over from the day before, and scored into chunks so it can be conveniently remelted. (Cutting up a large chunk of chocolate is rather like trying to carve rock: one needs an icepick and hammer at the very least, and plastic explosives can come in handy for especially large pieces.)

chocolate slag

Then one heats about 10 pounds of slag slowly, in a giant glass bowl, in the microwave, until you have a big crucible full of molten chocolate. This step is very dangerous; the rising fumes from the chocolate can be intoxicating, and a single misstep can have dire results. (Imagine trying to clean ten pounds of thick, slippery chocolate off the floor – especially after it hardens!)

Then one (carefully) pours the 10-pound melted chocolate into the giant bowl of the tempering machine, and sets the machine going. Here’s a video of the chocolate tempering:

Chocolate, like all precious metals, is actually composed of tiny crystals. In the case of chocolate, the cocoa butter can harden into five crystal forms, only one of which is stable at room temperature. The others slowly convert to the stable form over a period of hours to days, but it happens very slowly, and since the process is slow, you get large crystals of cocoa butter rather than lots of tiny ones. The result is a streaky, gray appearance, a crumbly texture, and an unpleasantly grainy mouthfeel. Kind of like this:

To avoid ugly, grainy bonbons, you temper the chocolate before using it. In the traditional method, you melt the chocolate until all the crystals are melted, then pour the molten chocolate onto a marble slab and scrapes it around until it begins to thicken. Then you quickly heat it to working temperature (about 88-90 F) to use it. The rapid cooling and scraping on the marble precipitates the formation of lots of small seed crystals; heating it back up to 88-90 degrees melts all the unstable cocoa butter crystals, leaving you only with the stable kinds.

I used to do it this way. It’s complicated, messy, and you can’t do a lot of chocolate with it, because after three or four ten-pound batches, the marble heats up and you can’t use it again until it cools. (Though it is rather fun scraping the chocolate back and forth over the marble slab with a pair of giant drywall tape knives; there’s the pleasure of making a huge mess and then cleaning it up again with a flick of the “knife”.)

The other method is to melt up the chocolate to 130 degrees, then cool it rapidly by dumping in hunks of previously-tempered chocolate. As the tempered chocolate melts, they seed the molten chocolate with the stable crystals, and all is well. The only problem is that one then has hunks of solid chocolate in one’s tempered chocolate, resulting in lumpiness.

Enter the chocolate tempering machine. This groovy gadget has a bowl divided into two parts, with a partition that lets melted chocolate through, while keeping the solid chunks on one side. This allows you to “seed” your chocolate without getting chunks of solid chocolate into your melted chocolate. Here’s a pic of a tempering machine in action:

chocolate tempering machine in action

The molten chocolate stays on the front side, the solid chocolate stays on the back side. The bowl rotates to mix the chocolate, and a thermocouple embedded in the plastic divider senses the temperature, allowing the machine to heat or cool to keep the chocolate at the ideal working temperature.

Now that you’ve got a big bowl of tempered chocolate, you can start dipping your bonbons! Here’s a shot of some MacAllan 12 Scotch whiskey truffles being dipped:

bonbon centers and finished chocolates

I grab a center from the near side, and dump it into the melted chocolate. Then I dunk it using the dipping fork, and immediately pull it out of the chocolate with the fork, like so:

The center is covered with more melted chocolate than necessary, so I shake the chocolate a little, then tap the dipping fork on the side of the bowl (a little tricky, since the bowl is continuously rotating). Then I scrape off the bottom of the center as I take the chocolate out.

Here’s a pic of me cleaning off the excess chocolate (note the small ribbon of chocolate falling back into the bowl):

removing excess chocolate from a freshly-dipped bonbon

Then you slide the bonbon off onto the tray. The chocolate tends to run off the front side, forming a little puddle at the bottom, so to avoid having an unsightly “foot,” you push the bonbon forward ever so slightly as you deposit it. This hides the “foot” under the bonbon.

Here’s a chocolate being deposited onto the tray. In this photo, I’ve actually already pushed the chocolate a bit forward, so no foot is visible.

depositing a dipped chocolate onto the tray

Once the chocolate is deposited onto the tray, it needs to be decorated. So we typically have two people at a dipping station: one person dips the chocolates, the other puts on the transfer sheets. This are sheets of smooth plastic screen printed with a design (I use Chinese paper-cut animals because I like the look), then hand-painted with subtly sparkly, colored cocoa butter to give a textured, glistening look to the backgrounds. It takes six or seven hours to paint the transfer sheets and another 6-7 hours to hand-cut the sheets, one by one, afterwards – so it is a royal pain but worth every instant, as it produces beautiful chocolates.

Here’s a friend putting on transfer sheets while I dip chocolates:

applying a transfer sheet to a freshly dipped chocolate

Applying transfer sheets looks simple but can be a bit of a challenge. To start, you need to apply the transfer sheet as soon after dipping as possible, because the transfer process relies on the heat from the melted chocolate to fuse the cocoa butter design to the chocolate. If you don’t apply it quickly enough, the transfer looks ragged or doesn’t work at all.

Then, you want all four corners clearly visible, so you need to press down evenly, but if you press down too hard, the chocolate on the top slides downward, resulting in an unsightly “foot”. The design also needs to be centered on the chocolate, so careful placement is important too. So, while not as tricky as dipping chocolates, this does require skill and a delicate touch.

You keep doing this until you have an entire tray full of dipped chocolates:

tray of freshly dipped chocolates

Once the chocolate has hardened sufficiently (several hours to a day depending on room temperature), you peel away the transfer sheets, trim off the colored cocoa butter by running a gloved finger around the edge of each and every bonbon, trim away any “feet”, and put the chocolates away. This takes about half an hour per tray – which doesn’t sound like much, but adds up to 18 hours over the course of making 36 flavors.

Plus we got started on a bunch of new flavors. Here’s a luscious video of the strawberry rose honey fruit gels, bubbling away:

And here it is, cooling in the frame:

strawberry rose honey fruit gels

I also got bold and made some pecan, walnut, and sesame giandujas. Giandujas are a mix of nut paste, chocolate, and sugar (the most famous one is Nutella) – I’ve attempted it a few times in the past, with mixed results. But we were running far enough ahead of schedule that I felt I could afford an experiment or two, so we made maple pecan gianduja, cinnamon-walnut gianduja with tiny bits of caramel mixed in, and sesame gianduja with tiny bits of caramel-covered sesame seeds mixed in, and a dusting of cardamom on top. Here are two of the giandujas, poured, hardened, and ready to cut and dip:

maple pecan and walnut caramel cinnamon giandujas

And, finally, here are coconut fudge and a thin layer of Concord grape fruit gel. The coconut fudge will get dipped in chocolate with an almond on top (making a very high-class Almond Joy), and the Concord grape fruit gel will get a second layer of peanut butter gianduja poured on top. Yes, that’s right – I’m making a chocolate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich!

coconut fudge and Concord grape fruit jellies

And, finally, another peek behind the scenes. Here is about 8 pounds of leftover chocolate at the end of the day, poured into a giant sheet pan, scored, and ready to be remelted and used the next day. (I call it “chocolate slag”.)

chocolate slag

The “score” so far is 28 pounds, 1 ounce of finished chocolates. Only ~100 pounds to go!

Chocolate season has begun! I kicked it off on Tuesday with green tea/honey fudge and jasmine tea/dark chocolate/walnut fudge. Here’s the green tea/honey fudge in progress – doesn’t it make a fabulous witches’ cauldron?

green tea honey fudge in progress

No eye of newt, however – just matcha powder, honey, sugar, and cream. (Well, I may have thrown in a neighbor’s kid or two. Hopefully nobody will notice!)

And here’s the finished jasmine tea/dark chocolate/walnut fudge…

jasmine tea/dark chocolate/walnut fudge

(I apologize for the somewhat industrial-looking nature of the fudge…giant pans of fudge are delicious but not especially photogenic. Not to worry, pretty pictures coming soon!)

Next up was the lemon lavender white chocolate fudge:

lemon-lavender-white chocolate-fudge

This fudge is actually made with Meyer lemons, which are a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange…it has a fruitier and more floral taste than the Eureka lemon you see in supermarkets, which pairs very nicely with the vanilla flavor in the white chocolate.

I also made some coconut tequila lime fudge:

coconut tequila lime fudge

This one looks different because it hasn’t crystallized yet. Finished fudge is a matrix of very small sugar crystals, which give it its luscious mouthfeel. The way you get those crystals is to heat the syrup to ~240 degrees Fahrenheit, then cool it rapidly to 130 degrees. This creates a supersaturated sugar syrup. Then you agitate the syrup until it crystallizes. This produces lots of small sugar crystals, giving the fudge a smooth mouthfeel. (If you left it to crystallize naturally on its own, it would produce large crystals and a grainy mouthfeel.)

Anyway, once it’s fully crystallized it will become opaque and bright white – and delicious.

I also made two batches of caramels:

cinnamon honey caramel

This one’s really nice – I used Vietnamese cinnamon from Penzey’s (a wonderful source for fresh spices), which has a bit of a kick to it. So the flavor is intensely cinnamon, a little bit hot, and with a honey finish.

And, finally, I made a batch of salted lavender caramels:

salted lavender caramels

I taste-tested two versions on last year’s coworkers – one batch with fleur de sel (French sea salt) sprinkled over it, and one batch with no salt. Interestingly, while people couldn’t identify what was different between salt and no salt, they preferred the salted version. So, sea salt it is.

The last thing I did was to paint all my chocolate transfer sheets. Those are the decorative designs put on top of every chocolate. Here’s a photo of some finished chocolates from last year:

finished chocolates

These designs are made by using chocolate transfer sheets, which are basically decals made of cocoa butter (for those of you old enough to remember decals, that is!). You screen print designs on a sheet of acetate using thickened cocoa butter. Then you dip a center in chocolate, and immediately lay a transfer sheet on top. The still-molten chocolate melts the cocoa butter on the acetate, merging the cocoa butter into the chocolate. Then, after it hardens, you simply peel away the transfer sheet, leaving the design on the chocolate.

I like to have a textured, colored background on my chocolates, so I have the images professional screen printed, and then paint the backgrounds by hand with a contrasting color of cocoa butter. The process looks like this:

chocolate transfer sheets being painted

And the fully painted transfer sheets look like this:

fully painted transfer sheet

Notice you can still see the brush strokes – that’s intentional, as I love the slightly textured effect this produces.

This morning, my goal is to make one final batch of fudge, and three more flavors of caramels. In the afternoon, I’ll pull out the chocolate tempering machine, and start making those pans of caramel into some seriously luscious bonbons!